It is May 1610, and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)—having fled Rome on trial for the murder of a pimp on a tennis-court in 1606—is completing his last-known painting, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610) in Spanish-occupied Naples. The characteristic themes of the most patronised painter of the Italian Baroque are all there, cast in his sustained logic of light and shadow: choreographic half-length figures, shining armour, poor hygiene. The painting arrived in Genoa by mid-June; the painter, already set out from Naples and assured of a pardon in Rome, never reached his destination. He died in Porto Ercole at the age of 38, “as miserably as he had lived … without the aid of God or man,” as his biographer records (Balgione, 1642).
From its receipt in Genoa, the painting passed across the walls of some of Italy’s grandest collections—those of the Doria and Romana-Avezzano families, Banca Commerciale Italiana, the Gallerie d’Italia—over a course of nearly four centuries, unnoticed and misattributed to a Calabrian follower of the Caravaggian school. But a tip-off in the 1970s to an Italian art historian, Vicenzo Pacelli, led to the discovery of two letters in the Archivio di Stato in Naples by Caravaggio’s factotum, which certifies that The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was Caravaggio’s final painting.
The painting, unseen in the UK for nearly 20 years, is the subject of a new exhibition at the National Gallery in London, “The Last Caravaggio” (closing 21st July), in which it is exhibited alongside another of his late works, Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist (c. 1609-10) and the letter from the Archivio di Stato in Naples, which is displayed for the first time in the UK. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula is also the final self-revelation of the final act, a maniacal exhaustion of fate and worldliness at the heights of youth and infamy—the perfect celebrity downfall.
An old Campanian proverb states, “see Naples and die,” and Caravaggio proved the truth of those words in rapid succession after his climactic years of productivity and personal drama. His depiction of Saint Ursula departs from the traditional iconography of the saint—the symbols of martyrdom, a few of the 11,000 companion virgins—choosing instead to depict the moment at which she is shot by her former suitor, the Prince of the Huns. It has the shocking immediacy of Salome and his other half-length pictures, and the effect is immersive and violent: “You come upon the scene midway and you’re immersed in it,” as Martin Scorsese, who credits it as a compositional influence, has said. The inclusion of a barely secreted self-portrait, eyes and mouth hollowed by the horror, looks speechless but demonstrative: it is the face of someone keen to declare an honest knowledge of injustice.
Caravaggio had left Rome with a bando capitale on his head—entitling anyone in the Papal States to perform a citizen’s execution—and, after being evicted by the Knights of St. John in Malta who had offered him membership in exchange for the Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608), he returned to Naples for the second time, described then by Cervantes as “the richest and most depraved city in the whole world.” Although Caravaggio had been launched and patronised by the eminent Cardinal Francesco del Monte, the papal authorities in Rome now sought his head. Naples, and intermittently Sicily and Malta, were but brief refuge for the convict. It is therefore fitting that the painting is exhibited alongside the National Gallery’s own, depicting the fulfilled wish of King Herod’s dancing daughter: “that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist” (Mark 6:25). The simple composition—his evolved three-figure arrangement, each numbered and necessary—and a restrained palette characteristic of the later work belies a physical and psychological complexity: an impassive executioner delivers the head to the salver; Salome receives the guilt, her lit face unknowingly mirrored by the morbid head of a maidservant (or her vindictive mother) in her shadow, paired like the bust of a female Janus. Both paintings unwittingly depict the death of two people who deny the fundamental validity of a marriage: either between a Christian virgin and a Hun, or a king and his dead brother’s wife.
“I find no peace, and yet I make no war; / and fear, and hope; and burn, and am a freezing fire,” as Petrarch, busy firing the coals of Renaissance Italy, put it. Indeed, the Milanese painter had passed through the world with such turbulence—aristocratic imposter, murderer, urchin, darling of the Barberini—that this exhibition, contained to one room, is subsequently a greater testament of Caravaggio, “The Last,” than an insightful exposition of his later practice. At that point, “his draughtsmanship collapsed … his imprecise brushwork … shows us the magic had evaporated,” as Andrew Graham-Dixon declared of the final Neapolitan years. But as a scenographer and manipulator of the “stage’s players,” little is missing—he knew the world too intimately by then for it not to be. The self-portrait, the duplicity of misplaced desire, hooded mortality, the head of a saint: at once, both pictures seemingly express all the pangs of guilt and ego conceivable in a person undergoing a prolonged self-annihilation.
In time for Easter this year, the National Gallery in London unveiled a very different painting—and its latest acquisition—painted within twenty years of Caravaggio’s last artwork. Eucharist (c. 1637-40) by Nicholas Poussin (1594-1664) is from the French painter’s monumental first cycle of the “Seven Sacraments,” a subject he painted twice by popular demand and which is considered to be one of the greatest depictions of the Last Supper. It is the 15th of his paintings to enter the Gallery’s collection, entitling it to be the best outside of the Louvre, and confirming what Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding president of the Royal Academy, suspected in 1785 when he said that “The Poussins are a real national object.” The paintings of the second cycle are on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland.
The painting, acquired by the gallery through the Duke of Rutland’s 2000 Settlement in lieu of inheritance tax, sits next to Marriage (another new arrival from the first cycle, on loan) opposite Poussin’s well-known depictions of Bacchanalian revels—scenes of slipped masks, sipped chalices, and swagged toga—and Aaron with the ‘stiffnecked’ Israelites adoring his molten calf. Christ and his Apostles sit, by contrast, in a symmetrical and holy calm around the central event by which the Christian faith became religious: the moment at which Divine Grace was communicated as “the new testament of my blood” (Luke 22:20), the cup itself protruding into the picture plain and thereby into the division between Christ and viewer. All of the faces are fixed by the dimly lit unfolding drama; its strikingly democratic composition, staged around a Roman triclinium, contrasts with the bright colours and rhythmical exuberance of the opposite paintings.
By damage and design (the painting having been caught, but saved, in the 1816 fire at Belvoir Castle by which two others were destroyed), the barely distinguishable background intermingles with the night: Gethsemane awaits. One figure reveres Christ and his institution of the Eucharist; another shows astonishment at the prophetic words concerning his imminent betrayal; John sleeps on a cushion. However, the picture is almost totally divested of movement—it has an anachronic effect on the scene—ruptured only by the departing servant to the left: having incidentally delivered “to the upper room … when the hour is come” (Luke 22:12–14) nothing less than the apotheosis of the Christian drama, his part is finished. Judas is the only one of the thirteen who is turned, rapt in distant thought or self-persuasion: “there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you” (1 Corinthians 10:19). On this fulfilment of prophecy, the unity of narrative unravels all at once, but the focus is centred on the point of blessing and that which Aquinas surely meant by “the summit of the teaching that wisdom flows from intrinsic grace.”
Poussin, born in Normandy, but adopted by Rome in place and practice, is regarded as the founder of French Classical painting, a return to Classicism that diverged from the prevailing Mannerist tendencies that had captivated Paris. There is a moral solemnity and economy to his paintings and especially so in the “Sacraments” cycle. Modest in size, academic, seemingly contained gallery pictures commissioned by antiquarians and scholars, they contrast with the heights of Baroque catechism which surrounded Poussin in Rome for almost his entire life. The set subsequently represents the most important of his life’s commissions and is deemed “one of the purest exemplifications of the Classical spirit in painting”—the figures are noble-looking and conventional; the lighting and composition is for the purpose of narrative rather than contrived theatrical effect.
The National Gallery celebrates its bicentenary later this year, for which the current exhibition and recent acquisition are deserving. Further planned exhibitions on Parmigianino’s “The Vision of St Jerome” (December) and “Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350” (March 2025) follow a hugely popular exhibition of the life and artistic legacy of St. Francis of Assisi last summer. In 2021, the gallery founded the Interfaith Sacred Art Forum for faith leaders and theologians, and the Sacred Art in Collections pre-1900 Network for curators and art historians—each an invaluable initiative dedicated to the preservation and promotion of one of the world’s greatest collections of religious painting. These are the latest in an admirable and consistent stream of expositions of the European Christian inheritance. It is refreshing in the face of the historical relativism for which British galleries, perhaps unfairly, have become infamous.
